ERP for IT Services. From SOW to utilisation: every billable hour tied to revenue.
An IT services firm sells capacity. Kinnow ties each SOW (statement of work) to its timesheets, milestones, support tickets and invoices, so utilisation, bench and margin come from one record instead of three tools.
From December 2026How does Kinnow help an IT services firm? A SOW becomes an engagement with milestones, a rate card by role and approved timesheets. Time-and-materials hours and completed milestones become invoices without double billing, support tickets run on SLA plans (the response and fix times you promise a customer), and recognised and deferred revenue come from the contract. Nothing is billed, filed or paid without a person.
Singapore edition, from December 2026. Nothing on this page is live in Singapore today. The ready-made setup for IT services (we call it an industry pack) is already built into the product. We apply it with you when the edition opens.
Your firm, in one paragraph.
You sell people. Revenue is billable days on time-and-materials work, milestones on fixed-price work, and monthly support. Cost is the same people, billable or not, so the gap between the two is the bench. SOW milestones sit in one tool and timesheets in another, invoices wait for someone to reconcile them, and a support ticket after go-live is rarely charged to the engagement that created it. Cloud tools bought from overseas suppliers add GST you account for yourself (reverse charge); Kinnow counts such a bill in the F5 (the quarterly GST return)'s purchases and output-tax boxes once it is recorded that way.
Three things keep the delivery head awake: bench time hidden inside an average, a milestone that slips while a team stands idle on someone else's clock, and an incident resolved outside the agreed window that turns into a credit note.
How your month runs on Kinnow
The setup gives you two step-by-step routines: SOW to utilisation and Incident to resolved.
| Step | Who | What Kinnow does | Where a person approves |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Opportunity to SOW | Sales head | The pipeline in Sell takes an opportunity through requirement, SOW proposed, rates negotiated and signed. | Signing the SOW needs a senior person's approval. A large open deal raises a warning. |
| 2. Create the engagement | Delivery head | An engagement is opened in Build with milestones, a rate card by role and staffing. | A contract over your limit needs project approval. |
| 3. Deliver and report time | Consultants | Timesheets are filed against the engagement. A chaser lists missing and stale ones. | The engagement lead approves, or sends back with a reason. |
| 4. Accept milestones | Delivery head | A deliverable is submitted for acceptance, can be sent back, and accepted work is billing evidence. Scope drift is compared with the agreed effort. | Client acceptance is recorded. |
| 5. Invoice | Accounts | Approved hours are invoiced at the rate frozen on each timesheet; a completed milestone is invoiced once. Kinnow stops double billing. GST is priced per line and the invoice is checked as a tax invoice. | An invoice over your limit needs approval. |
| 6. Support after go-live | Support lead | Tickets run on SLA plans with response and resolution due times. A ticket outside a plan is blocked. A defect can be escalated into the engineering backlog, which parks the ticket on hold until it is fixed. | The client confirms the fix before closure. |
| 7. Recognise revenue | Finance controller | A contract is split into performance obligations by standalone selling price, a revenue schedule is built, and a monthly recognition run posts the journal. | A manager activates the contract. |
| 8. Collect | Accounts | The client sees and can dispute the invoice in the customer portal; Collections drafts reminders by days overdue. | Escalated reminders go to a person. |
| 9. Close and file | Accounts head | Twelve month-end checks, seven of which must pass. The quarter's GST F5 is drafted for review once the groundwork is completed before launch and filed by your team. | Books closed and the return approved by people. |
Bring one live SOW; we will show it from timesheet to invoice to recognised revenue.
Utilisation, bench and what a ticket costs
Utilisation over capacity
Billable hours over each person's weekly capacity, never over hours worked, so a bench cannot hide. Bands run from bench to over-committed; a person with no recorded capacity is shown as unknown, not 0 per cent.
Capacity forecast
Allocations by week show who is free next month.
Support cost against the engagement
The engagement profit and loss counts support tickets. Work done and never billed raises a warning, since it quietly reduces margin until renewal.
Revenue by obligation
Several elements in one contract are allocated by selling price and recognised as each is satisfied. Deferred revenue is a balance, not a side sheet.
What the IT services setup puts in place
Four sign-off routes come with it (engagement, journal, return filing and invoice), with sixteen processes, fifteen Ask Kinnow starters and ten reports, including the engagement register, milestone status, ticket SLA status, attrition, project cost and support cost by engagement. Every limit is set in Singapore dollars with you in the first week.
| Limit | Effect | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery commitment over your limit | Project approval | A large SOW commits people for months |
| Support ticket outside an SLA plan | Blocked | No plan means no clock, so it can never breach |
| Open deal value over your limit | Warning | It moves the forecast the moment it is typed |
| Milestone invoice over your limit | Approval | Large invoices are checked before they go out |
| Manual journal; return filing, net payable | Approval | Both move money or books on a person's say |
| Support work never billed | Warning | Unbilled effort erodes margin without showing as a loss |
Agents for an IT services firm
Engagement Margin Watch
Compares revenue, delivery cost and support cost as the SOW runs and flags drift before the final bill. Shows unknown, not healthy, when it cannot price one.
SLA Alert
Flags a ticket at risk of breaching from its response and resolution due times against now.
Contract Renewal Watch
Sweeps contracts nearing their end date so the renewal conversation is scheduled before a support contract lapses.
Project Risk
Warns you when a project is running late, spending ahead of the work done, or billing ahead of it, measured against the baselined bill of quantities (BoQ).
SellLead Scorer
Scores each lead from 0 to 100 when it is created or imported, with the reasons and a suggested next step. A person decides who to call.
Sell + AccountCollections
Drafts overdue reminders and steps them up according to how many days a payment is actually late. A person approves each reminder before it goes out.
Account / KnowCash-flow Forecaster
Builds a rolling cash forecast for the next 30, 60 and 90 days from post-dated cheques, bills due and how customers have paid in the past, with a range around each figure to show how sure it is.
Every agent is validated with each client before it works on their books, and every output waits for a person.
Ask us which of these agents we would switch on first for your delivery team.
Statutory calendar for an IT services firm
Alerts go out 15, 7 and 1 day before each filing on the calendar. Kinnow prepares; a person confirms and files. Dates are confirmed with IRAS (Singapore's tax authority), ACRA (the company registrar) and MOM (the Ministry of Manpower), not printed here.
| Obligation | What Kinnow prepares | What stays with you |
|---|---|---|
| GST F5 return (quarterly) | Boxes 1 to 8 of the F5 for the quarter, from the sales invoices, credit notes and purchase bills in your books; a credit note reverses its line. Kinnow prices each line at 9 per cent, zero-rates a customer outside Singapore and carries a short exempt list. The calendar puts each return one month after its quarter ends, from the accounting cycle IRAS gave you; it refuses to guess the cycle. | A person reviews every box and files through the IRAS portal with their own CorpPass (the government login for businesses) login. Kinnow does not submit it. A Singapore adviser checks the box layout against the current IRAS form before the first filing. |
| Tax invoices | The Singapore country setup holds the checks for a tax invoice: a valid GST registration number or UEN (company registration number), date, serial number, the GST amount, and the words Tax Invoice on a full tax invoice (a simplified invoice is allowed up to S$1,000 including GST). A reverse-charge supply that also charges GST is refused. | The finance lead decides which invoices are simplified and which supplies are reverse-charge. |
| InvoiceNow (e-invoicing) | An invoice to another business is marked to go through InvoiceNow, Singapore's national e-invoicing network. Kinnow builds the invoice file in the Peppol format that InvoiceNow uses, addressed by UEN (the company registration number), and refuses one with no supplier UEN. It runs against a test connection only: nothing reaches the network. | Connecting a certified access point (an approved sender on the InvoiceNow network) is a commercial step with a provider. Once delivered, an invoice cannot be cancelled; a credit note corrects it. |
| CPF and the Skills Development Levy (monthly) | Payroll works out CPF (the Central Provident Fund contributions) by age band, on the ordinary-wage ceiling, and the employer's Skills Development Levy, on each payslip. It needs a recorded date of birth and citizen or permanent-resident status, and lists anyone it had to skip. It withholds no income tax: Singapore has no PAYE for citizens and permanent residents. | Payment and submission to the CPF Board happen outside Kinnow. IR8A, IR8S, Appendix 8A (the yearly employee pay statements) and the monthly CPF submission are named in the Singapore setup as filings; Kinnow does not prepare or submit them. |
| Work pass quota (if you hire foreign workers) | Tracked as a registration with a monthly review date. The quota is a ratio against local headcount, not a filing. | The HR head owns the numbers. The foreign worker levy is not built. |
| ACRA annual return, AGM, estimated chargeable income, corporate tax return | Tracked as registrations on your company, each with the due date Kinnow works out and a lead time before it. The AGM and the annual return are two items, because they run on two clocks. | The company secretary and finance head confirm every date against ACRA and IRAS, and file. |
What the owner sees
| Ask Kinnow | Answer built from |
|---|---|
| Which engagements are behind on milestones? | Project milestone status |
| Which support tickets are close to breaching? | Ticket SLA status |
| Which engagements are losing money once support is counted? | Support cost by engagement |
| Which support work has been done but never billed? | Support cost by engagement |
| Where is attrition risk concentrated? | Attrition report |
| What has this engagement actually cost us so far? | Project cost register |
Each answer shows its source and what it will cost before it runs. Veil, our privacy layer, holds back bank, tax and ID numbers and swaps names for placeholders before an AI call. It covers Ask Kinnow and most agents today; the rest are being added.
Ask us to run these questions on your numbers.
Questions
Can Kinnow show utilisation and bench?
Yes. Billable hours are measured against each person's weekly capacity, with bands from bench to over-committed, and a capacity forecast by week from allocations.
Does it handle revenue recognition?
Yes. A revenue contract is split into performance obligations by standalone selling price, a revenue schedule is built for each obligation, and a monthly run posts the recognition journal. A manager activates each contract.
Can I bill time and materials and milestones on the same engagement?
Yes. Approved timesheets and completed milestones are separate sources, each invoiced once and never twice, and they share one ledger.
Does Kinnow replace our issue tracker?
No. Issues, sprints and releases are there at a basic level, with tickets escalated into them, but source code and CI/CD stay in your DevOps tools.
How are SLA breaches handled?
Each ticket sits on an SLA plan with response and resolution due times. Kinnow blocks a ticket outside a plan, and an alert flags tickets approaching breach.
Does it work out CPF for my consultants?
Yes, for citizens and permanent residents, by age band, once each employee has a date of birth and residency status recorded. It lists anyone it has to skip. Foreign worker levy and work-pass tracking are not built.
How long does set-up take?
About two weeks to first results for one company, counted from when your Singapore edition is switched on in December 2026: masters and opening balances in the first week, agents switched on and a first close in the second.
Does it work on a phone?
It works in the phone browser. There is no separate mobile app.
Show me Kinnow for IT Services.
Answer three questions. Get the applications, the agents and a two-week plan for your business.